Belauan

Palauan, called tekoi er a Belau by its speakers, is a Malayo-Polynesian language of the Austronesian family, native to the Palau archipelago at the western end of the Caroline Islands. It occupies an unusual place in Micronesian linguistics: together with Chamorro it is one of only two indigenous languages of the region that fall outside the Oceanic sub-branch, and its exact relatives remain disputed. The name Belau goes back to the Palauan word for village.

The islands were settled by Austronesian migrants from the direction of the Philippines or Indonesia in the third or second millennium before Christ. The Magellan expedition sighted the outlying island of Sonsorol as early as 1521.

In 1696 Palauan sailors shipwrecked on Samar enabled the missionary Paul Klein to draw the first European map of the islands. Palauan remained an oral language, with no Latin-letter orthography until the later colonial period.